Retirees and near-retirees are leaving behind a devastated economy for their children ... but are we doing anything to fix it? Here, two generations debate who's really to blame for the wreckage.

Rob Finch Visuals/The author (left, background) and his father (center)

CRESCENT LAKE, Ore.--My father taught
me how to throw a baseball and divide big numbers in my head and build a
life where I'd be home in time to eat dinner with my kid most nights.
He and my mother put me through college and urged me to follow my
dreams. He never complained when I entered a field even less respected
than his. He lives across the country and still calls just to check in
and say he loves me.

His name is Tom. He is 63, tall and lean, a contracts lawyer in a small Oregon
town. A few wisps of hair still reach across his scalp. The moustache I
have never seen him without has faded from deep brown to silver. The
puns he tormented my younger brother and me with throughout our
childhood have evolved, improbably, into the funniest jokes my
6-year-old son has ever heard. I love my dad fiercely, even though he's
beaten me in every argument we've ever had except two, and even though
he is, statistically and generationally speaking, a parasite.

This is the charge I've leveled against him on a summer day in our
Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney
to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation,
in what should be a slam-dunk trial--for me. On behalf of future
generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of
breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a
better country on to its children than the one it inherited.

We are sitting on a beach in late afternoon on a sun-drizzled lake in
the Cascade Mountains, two college-educated, upper-middle-class white
men settling in for a week of generational warfare. My son, Max,
splashes in the waves with his grandmother; sunbathers lounge in inner
tubes around us; snow-capped peaks loom above the tree line. The breeze
smells of Coppertone and wet dog. My father thinks back on the country
that awaited him when he finished law school. "There seemed to be a lot
of potential," he says, setting up the first of many evasions, "but
there weren't a lot of jobs."

I'm mildly impressed that he's even bothering to mount a defense. The
facts as I see them are clear and damning: Baby boomers took the
economic equivalent of a king salmon from their parents and, before they
passed it on, gobbled up everything but the bones.

Ultimately, members of my father's generation--generally defined as
those born between 1946 and 1964--are reaping more than they sowed. They
graduated smack into one of the strongest economic expansions in
American history. They needed less education to snag a decent-salaried
job than their children do, and a college education cost them a small
fraction of what it did for their children or will for their grandkids.
One income was sufficient to get a family ahead economically. Marginal
federal income-tax rates have fallen steadily, with rare exception,
since boomers entered the labor force; government retirement benefits
have proliferated. At nearly every point in their lives, these Americans
chose to slough the costs of those tax cuts and spending hikes onto
future generations.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose twelvefold from the time the
first boomers began working until last year, when they began to cash out
their retirement. (The growth trend over the 12 years since I entered
the workforce suggests that the Dow will double exactly once before I
retire.) They will leave the workforce far wealthier than their parents
did, with even more government promises awaiting them. Boomers will be
the first generation of retirees to fully enjoy the Medicare
prescription-drug benefit; because Social Security payouts rise faster
than price inflation, they will draw more-generous retirement benefits
than their parents did, in real terms--at their children's expense. The
Urban Institute estimated last year that a couple retiring in 2011,
having both earned average wages, will accrue about $200,000 more in
Medicare and Social Security benefits over their lifetimes than they
paid in taxes to support those programs.

Those retirees and near-retirees bequeath a shambles to their
offspring. Young people are unemployed at historically high levels.
Global competition is stronger than ever, but American institutions have
not adapted to prepare new workers for its challenges. Boomers have run
up incomes for the very wealthiest Americans, shrunk the middle class,
and, via careless borrowing and reckless financial engineering, driven
the economy into the worst recession in 80 years. The Pew Research
Center reports that middle-class families today are 5 percent less
wealthy than their parents were at the same point in their lives, after
adjusting for inflation, even though families today are far more likely
to include two wage earners. Another Pew report shows that those ages
55 to 64 are 10 percent wealthier today, even after the Great Recession,
than Americans of that age bracket were in 1984. Those younger than 35
are 68 percent less wealthy than the same bracket was in 1984.

The baby boomers built an economy where young people increasingly
need a college education to move into the middle class, or even to
simply hold on to the middle-class lifestyle they were born into. But
the boomers who run state legislatures and private universities have
collectively pushed the costs of that now-requisite education into the
stratosphere. Tuition has risen at twice the rate of inflation: In
today's dollars, tuition, room, and board at a four-year public college
ran nearly $6,800 per year in 1967; it costs about $13,300 today.
Private-college tabs have more than doubled in that time. The increase
has saddled young workers with more than $1 trillion in student debt--the
average college student today borrows six times more from the federal
government to finance her education, per year, than the average student
in 1970. The boomers keep their low taxes, and their alma maters gain
prestige, but the next generation of workers starts with a debt boulder
strapped to its back. All for no apparent gain. Today, Pew says, men who
grew up in the middle class are just as likely to earn less than their
fathers did (adjusting for inflation) as they are to earn more.

Members of my father's generation reaped the benefits of dirt-cheap
fossil fuels through most of their working lives, when gasoline price
increases ran well below inflation, freeing up cash for them to save or
spend on things their children now cannot afford. Because gas was so
cheap, they burned too much of it (my father has never owned a car that
averaged better than 20 miles per gallon), filling the atmosphere with
carbon dioxide to levels that scientists warn will likely warm the globe
by several degrees. Climate change will cost trillions of dollars to
avert or adapt to. It's almost impossible to overstate this level of
buck-passing.

Perhaps most egregiously, the baby boomers, led by boomer-coddling
leaders in Washington, are bequeathing a runaway national debt and a
gaping federal budget shortfall that their children and grandchildren
will have to pay--through higher taxes or reduced benefits, or both--if
they don't want the country to go broke. Balancing America's future
receipts and obligations would require all taxes to rise by 35 percent
"immediately and permanently," and all federal entitlement benefits to
decrease by another 35 percent, the International Monetary Fund
estimated last year. Shielding boomers from that pain--as most so-called
deficit hawks in Washington propose--would dramatically increase the bill
for everyone else. Brigham Young University economists Richard Evans
and Kerk Phillips and Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff
published a paper in January that projected a 1-in-3 chance that the
U.S. economy will reach "game over" within 30 years. In their
definition, "game over" means that the government's obligations to
seniors (thanks again, boomers) will exceed 100 percent of everyoneelse's
earnings. In other words, all the young workers in America together
won't earn enough to pay down the government's obligations to their
parents.

It is hard for me to see how the gray-mustachioed attorney is going to get his client out of this one.

That's my first mistake.

PARRY, RIPOSTE

Beginning in junior high, my father knew he wanted to be a lawyer. He
grew up an Air Force brat whose father designed cameras for spy planes,
and he landed in Los Angeles for high school. He met my mother at a
YMCA dance, kept his nose in his books while his University of California
(Santa Barbara) classmates bombed a bank to protest the Vietnam War,
and graduated near the top of his law-school class at the University of California (Los Angeles). Big firms in California and Colorado recruited him, but he opted for a clerkship at the Oregon
Supreme Court and then a two-man firm in a former timber town of 10,000
residents called McMinnville. There, my dad knew, he could balance work
with time for coaching Little League and leading the church vestry.

When I was a teenager working summers at McMinnville's semiweekly
newspaper, I'd often start one morning a week at a downtown coffee shop,
listening to a pair of old-timers give my dad all kinds of crap. They
ribbed him about politics, fishing technique, and proper deference to
the altar guild. They always made him buy their lattes. And when the
hour was up, they'd shoo him back to the law office with an admonition
to keep working so he could pay for their Social Security benefits.

You could call this anecdote Exhibit A in my father's defense of the
boomers, which he offered over coffee on the first day of our weeklong
dispute. It boils down to a claim that he didn't exactly inherit a great
deal, either. Tom Tankersley's argument breaks into two categories.
First, he deflects blame for all of the bad stuff of the past several
decades to previous generations and myopic politicians. Second, he
builds a case that the boomers did far more good than harm.

The Greatest Generation, his parents' cohort, paid a lot less into
Social Security and Medicare than it took out of it, he says. (This is
true.) It did nothing to reduce pollution, conserve natural resources,
or halt the nation's growing and dangerous addiction to fossil fuels.
"Previous generations did not have a Clean Air Act or a Clean Water
Act," he says. His enacted both. (Also true.)

Point, parasite.

After dinner at my parents' cabin near Crescent Lake, my father,
sporting a blue shirt with a tropical print, spends two hours setting up
targets and knocking them down with the precision of his favorite
target rifle. Lawmakers at some point stopped working together to solve
problems, he says. Big companies gorged on profits and stopped caring
for their workers' livelihoods. Regular people around the country spent
money they didn't have, signed mortgages they couldn't afford, and lost
their patience for delayed gratification. Who's to blame for the
cultural decay of personal responsibility? "I don't know which
generation's fault that is," my father says.

He says he's rather surprised that he's still in line to draw
Medicare and Social Security benefits. "I felt I was paying all this
money in, and it was going to be gone ... and it turns out I'm going to
get some." He complains that "no one" is willing to pay the necessary
taxes for government services or to adjust those services to current tax
levels. He manages to dismiss one of the greatest acts of fiscal
recklessness ever by a boomer--President George W. Bush's decision to run
two wars off the books without raising taxes or cutting outlays to fund
them--as "outrageous" and "not my choice."

Then he dives for my legs: There's no guarantee that young Max
Tankersley won't grow up to enjoy economic opportunities as sweeping as
those his grandparents did. Economic conditions change in unpredictable
ways, my dad says. Oh, and the idea that opportunity eroded for my
generation? Only if you're a white American man. In his lifetime, he
points out, women and minorities have seen their economic prospects
brighten considerably, especially in higher-earning fields like the law.
(A quartet of economists from Stanford and the University of Chicago
reported this spring, "In 1960, 94 percent of doctors were white men, as
were 96 percent of lawyers and 86 percent of managers. By 2008, these
numbers had fallen to 63, 61, and 57 percent, respectively.") Expanded
trade has helped to lift people in Africa, Brazil, China, and the rest
of the developing world out of poverty. (The World Bank reported this
year that 22 percent of the developing world's population lives on $1.25
or less per day, down from 52 percent in 1981.) My father says he will
not apologize for that.

I keep bringing him back to the critique: His generation bought homes
in a far cheaper market than mine; they didn't move us off oil; they've
reaped the stock gains and the carbon externalities and the budget
deficits--and left us with the bill. He keeps brushing me off, flipping
the camera. "There's this whole theory in democracy that you get the
government you deserve," he says, readying more verbal jujitsu. "And
it's our fault for not saying, 'That's enough,' just like it's your
fault. I mean, you've been voting now for how long?"

By evening's end, the defense has turned to open taunting. So what,
he asks, if it's his generation's fault? "What are you going to do with
that? Are you going to learn something and not do it? Or are you going
to just point fingers, like this article seems to be doing?"

I realize: He's beating me.

ROUND TWO

The day after my trouncing, we retreat farther into the mountains, to
a chilly lake where the Deschutes River springs to life, for a night of
camping with family friends. We swim and roast marshmallows and play in
the dirt and watch deer walk past the tent. Max helps my parents paddle
the canoe.

In the morning, we comb the campsite, picking up food wrappers and
specs of trash, some of them months old. You always leave your site
cleaner than you found it, I tell Max, because other people will come
after you, and others after them. It's your duty as a camper.

Where did you learn that? he asks.

Your grandpa, I say.

This is the moment the prosecution regains its footing, by
remembering just how hypocritical the defense has been. Boomers have
always talked about making the world a better place. They were the
century's most idealistic young people. They've also known for decades
about the fiscal, economic, and environmental paths America was headed
down. How can they possibly square that wisdom with their inaction?

We break camp. Back at the cabin, I call up statistics, build
economic charts online, and transplant a new backbone into my case. (I'd
chide my dad here for installing Wi-Fi at his cabin, but I think it was
Mom's idea.)

In my mind, I know which of his
arguments I must grant. The boomers haven't been a total disaster, of
course. They did indeed blaze huge social and economic trails for women,
minorities, and people with disabilities. Those groups have gained
rights that, as long as the rest of us remain vigilant, will never be
reversed: Young women can grow up to be lawyers or scientists.
African-Americans can grow up to be president. Boomers gave us Apple and
Microsoft. They made the StarWars movies. They grew the economy for a bit. Once, for a couple of years in the late 1990s, they balanced the federal budget.

But the numbers on the laptop remind me how fleeting much of that
progress was--and how boomers chose short-term gratification when they
had opportunities to secure a better future for generations to follow.
Classic example: Instead of devoting the budget surpluses of the late
'90s to social programs that desperately needed them, they voted
themselves tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and an expanded Medicare benefit
shortly after--a move a Congressional Budget Office study from that era
suggests raised the expected tax rate on future generations from 29
percent to 53 percent. They borrowed heavily to cope with the economic
sluggishness of the 2000s and, in so doing, inflated a housing bubble
that, when it popped, triggered the Great Recession.

Median-income growth has stagnated for women and minorities over the
past decade. The typical African-American today has less wealth than his
or her parents did, according to Pew. Labor-force participation for
women this year hit its lowest level since 1991.

And Congress? Well, Capitol Hill is where I realize I'll win this
trial. Baby boomers chose the leaders currently paralyzing Washington,
and those leaders are, by and large, boomers. My father's cohort has
formed a generational majority in every Congress since the dawn of the
George W. Bush administration. Electorally, boomers vote in dramatically
larger numbers than anyone else. The Census Bureau reports there were
81 million Americans ages 45 to 64 in 2010, of whom slightly more than
half voted. They made up about 43 percent of the electorate--almost as
much as those 25 to 44 and those 65 and older combined.

As afternoon descends over the fir trees, I call my father over and
show him this statistic. Look, I say. That government you say is
crippling America? You and your friends own it.

"Shit," he says.

BITTERSWEET VICTORY

The first time I bested my dad in an argument, I was in fourth grade.
I wanted to play football, and he said it was too dangerous. With my
mother's help, I trekked to the public library and pulled up some
research showing that youth football was perfectly safe (oops!) and even
built character. I may also have threatened to run away. My dad
relented. My football career was short and forgettable, but I'd beaten
him with data.

My second win came when I was in eighth grade and wanted to drive
eight hours with a bunch of college students and coaches to see my
favorite basketball team in a playoff game. My dad said, "No, you are
not driving to Idaho
with a bunch of college kids." To which I replied, tears in my eyes,
"Well, what if you came with me?" It was blatant emotional manipulation.
We ended up watching the Linfield Wildcats lose, in person, together.

I connect these two strategies in my closing argument against the
boomers. I win my conviction against my father on his fishing boat on a
choppy Friday, lines bobbing wildly in the swells, the trolling motor
struggling to hold speed against a bracing wind. The boy and the grandma
are back on shore. It is only us, a photographer, and a Labrador
retriever. I am at the wheel, my dad is working the rods.

I start with data. The deal the baby boomers got from the Greatest
Generation wasn't so raw, economically: Gross domestic product growth
from 1970 to 2000 was among the strongest in American history, and far
better than the average growth so far in the working years of
Generations X and Y.

The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act have improved the
environment, but the federal government has done almost nothing to curb
the growth in carbon emissions here or around the world. Earth's
atmosphere is currently 391 parts per million carbon dioxide, up from
about 325 ppm 40 years ago. The concentration is on pace to hit 450 ppm
by 2035, which would translate into an increase in global average
temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius, the tipping point at which scientists
say we would no longer be able to block or reverse a future of the most
catastrophic impacts of climate change. More high-temperature records
were set across the U.S. last year than in any previous one. Arctic ice
melted to an all-time recorded low.

America's federal debt-to-GDP ratio has more than doubled from 28
percent to 62 percent since 1970, and the borrowing has benefited
boomers far more than folks my age. A majority of boomers want no part
of paying that debt off through higher taxes or reduced benefits: A
recent Pew poll found "little appetite [among that age group] for
debt-reduction proposals that will take a bite out of their
pocketbooks."

And boomers seem to know that the
future won't be brighter for Max and his friends. Nationwide, optimism
that today's youth will fare better than their parents is down from a
peak of 71 percent a decade ago to 44 percent today, the lowest level
since 1983, according to Gallup. Pessimism is highest among--you guessed
it--baby boomers.

My emotional argument seals the case. Where I finally best my dad is
on the question of why his cohort hasn't stopped the freight trains of
generational woe that have been barreling down America's tracks for a
few decades now. The question he can't answer is this: How could the
members of a generation so willing to lecture everyone else on personal
responsibility not recognize, even at this stage in their lives, their
collective responsibility for ending this mess?

You used to be such an idealistic generation, I say. You were going
to change the world. Yet you've known all this was coming and haven't
tried seriously to stop it. You've reaped all the benefits and left the
rest of us the bill. And you knew what you were doing. Why?

He hooks and nets a fish. When he has rebaited the line, he vents
some frustration at his boomer peers/clients. "I'm saying, there are
problems," he says, "and I've been talking about them for a long time."

He stops pushing back and starts making concessions. On the budget,
he says, "You're right, we haven't had the, whatever, to say to our
parents' generation, 'No, we're not going to give you those Social
Security raises,' " even when, as in recent years, low inflation levels
haven't warranted them.

Those raises represent a tiny fraction of our future debt load (the
lethal combination of soaring Medicare costs and insufficient tax
revenue accounts for most of it), but, hey, I'll take what I can get.
Life isn't PerryMason; the defendant never confesses
on the stand. The closest my father comes, in this case, is with energy
policy and carbon pollution. "I'm disappointed in the environmental
thing," he says. "We could have done a lot more."

Our budget and economy are struggling through a huge transition, he
says. "But if the country says we've got this big challenge, and we're
going to share it in a fair way, then Max will be fine." I wonder aloud,
what are the odds that will happen? He grimaces under the mustache.
"Your generation, my generation, everybody," he says. "If someone says
you can have something for free, you tend to want to have it." He asks
me to swing the motor, and we steer back toward the dock, into a
gathering mass of black clouds.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

Only later do I notice the knife he's left in my side. We are sitting
at the kitchen table. He is joking about regrets ("You raise these
kids, and then they turn on you!") when he suddenly becomes serious and
offers me a rare piece of fatherly advice. "We didn't stop it. Maybe
someday, Max can have the same discussion with you and ask you why you
didn't stop it. He'll get the article out. He'll say, 'You knew about
it! You knew about it even more than [your parents] did!' "

The knife twists. I am 34 years old. I have some pretty successful
friends. How have we sacrificed to balance the budget, to slow climate
change, to deliver better opportunity for our children? We haven't. I
own an SUV, and I don't compost my trash. We are barreling,
generationally, toward higher and higher levels of carbon emissions; a
demographer from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
estimated last year that an individual's emissions rise some 50 percent
from the time he is in his 30s until the time he retires. Worst of all,
we don't seem to care about changing things: Only about a third of
registered 25-to-44-year-olds voted in the 2010 election, compared with
half of registered baby boomers.

If my father is a leech on the future, then I am becoming one, too.

"Your generation should be thinking about how you'll step up to the
plate," my dad says, brown eyes boring into mine. "And you also need to
step up to the plate, learning from us about the politics. Just say no
to the kind of politics that get in the way of what you perceive are the
solution."

He rises to water the saplings behind the cabin ("for the next
generation"), and leaves me to stare out through the tall firs. My
little boy has come in from playing in the dirt.

About the Author

Most Popular

The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. This year, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

On August 21, the “moon” will pass between the Earth and the sun, obscuring the light of the latter. The government agency NASA says this will result in “one of nature’s most awe-inspiring sights.” The astronomers there claim to have calculated down to the minute exactly when and where this will happen, and for how long. They have reportedly known about this eclipse for years, just by virtue of some sort of complex math.

This seems extremely unlikely. I can’t even find these eclipse calculations on their website to check them for myself.

Meanwhile the scientists tell us we can’t look at it without special glasses because “looking directly at the sun is unsafe.”

Just seven months into his presidency, Trump appears to have achieved a status usually reserved for the final months of a term.

In many ways, the Trump presidency never got off the ground: The president’s legislative agenda is going nowhere, his relations with foreign leaders are frayed, and his approval rating with the American people never enjoyed the honeymoon period most newly elected presidents do. Pundits who are sympathetic toward, or even neutral on, the president keep hoping that the next personnel move—the appointment of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, say, or the long-rumored-but-never-delivered departure of Steve Bannon—will finally get the White House in gear.

But what if they, and many other people, are thinking about it wrong? Maybe the reality is not that the Trump presidency has never gotten started. It’s that he’s already reached his lame-duck period. For most presidents, that comes in the last few months of a term. For Trump, it appears to have arrived early, just a few months into his term. The president did always brag that he was a fast learner.

An analysis of Stormfront forums shows a sometimes sophisticated understanding of the limits of ancestry tests.

The white-nationalist forum Stormfront hosts discussions on a wide range of topics, from politics to guns to The Lord of the Rings. And of particular and enduring interest: genetic ancestry tests. For white nationalists, DNA tests are a way to prove their racial purity. Of course, their results don’t always come back that way. And how white nationalists try to explain away non-European ancestry is rather illuminating of their beliefs.

Two years ago—before Donald Trump was elected president, before white nationalism had become central to the political conversation—Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan, sociologists then at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to study Stormfront forum posts about genetic ancestry tests. They presented their study at the American Sociological Association meeting this Monday. (A preprint of the paper is now online.) After the events in Charlottesville this week, their research struck a particular chord with the audience.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

Antifa’s activists say they’re battling burgeoning authoritarianism on the American right. Are they fueling it instead?

Since 1907, Portland, Oregon, has hosted an annual Rose Festival. Since 2007, the festival had included a parade down 82nd Avenue. Since 2013, the Republican Party of Multnomah County, which includes Portland, had taken part. This April, all of that changed.

In the days leading up to the planned parade, a group called the Direct Action Alliance declared, “Fascists plan to march through the streets,” and warned, “Nazis will not march through Portland unopposed.” The alliance said it didn’t object to the Multnomah GOP itself, but to “fascists” who planned to infiltrate its ranks. Yet it also denounced marchers with “Trump flags” and “red maga hats” who could “normalize support for an orange man who bragged about sexually harassing women and who is waging a war of hate, racism and prejudice.” A second group, Oregon Students Empowered, created a Facebook page called “Shut down fascism! No nazis in Portland!”

Anti-Semitic logic fueled the violence over the weekend, no matter what the president says.

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was ostensibly about protecting a statue of Robert E. Lee. It was about asserting the legitimacy of “white culture” and white supremacy, and defending the legacy of the Confederacy.

So why did the demonstrators chant anti-Semitic lines like “Jews will not replace us”?

The demonstration was suffused with anti-black racism, but also with anti-Semitism. Marchers displayed swastikas on banners and shouted slogans like “blood and soil,” a phrase drawn from Nazi ideology. “This city is run by Jewish communists and criminal niggers,” one demonstrator told Vice News’ Elspeth Reeve during their march. As Jews prayed at a local synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, men dressed in fatigues carrying semi-automatic rifles stood across the street, according to the temple’s president. Nazi websites posted a call to burn their building. As a precautionary measure, congregants had removed their Torah scrolls and exited through the back of the building when they were done praying.

The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history.

When did America become untethered from reality?

I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books.

If the president is concerned about violence on the left, he can start by fighting the white supremacist movements whose growth has fueled its rise.

In his Tuesday press conference, Donald Trump talked at length about what he called “the alt left.” White supremacists, he claimed, weren’t the only people in Charlottesville last weekend that deserved condemnation. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” he declared. “Nobody wants to say that.”

I can say with great confidence that Trump’s final sentence is untrue. I can do so because the September issue of TheAtlantic contains an essay of mine entitled “The Rise of the Violent Left,” which discusses the very phenomenon that Trump claims “nobody wants” to discuss. Trump is right that, in Charlottesville and beyond, the violence of some leftist activists constitutes a real problem. Where he’s wrong is in suggesting that it’s a problem in any way comparable to white supremacism.